Seriously, if you're racially insensitive, could you please just stay away from cartoons for a bit?

OK, maybe you want to equivocate on the New York Post's racist editorial cartoon conflating a runaway chimp with President Obama's stimulus bill. But there's no equivocating on this one: Dean Grose, mayor of Los Alamitos, Calif., sent out an e-mail with an image featuring a watermelon patch replacing the White House garden -- clearly a snipe directed at the first family. "I was horrified when I read that e-mail," Keyanus Price, a black businesswoman and one of several recipients of Grose's e-mail, told The Orange County Register. "What I'm concerned about is how can this person send an e-mail out like this and think it is OK?"

Grose explained the OK factor in a subsequent e-mail: "The way things are today, you gotta laugh every now and then. I wanna see the coloring contests."

To Price, the response was adding insult to injury, according to the Register. "As soon as I saw his response; that put me over the top because it was no big deal to him," she said.

Though at first he claimed not to know that the watermelon imagery was offensive to blacks (but then, why send the e-mail in the first place?), Grose has since apologized. "It was just poor judgment on my part, and I am deeply sorry," he said. "It wasn't meant to hurt [Price]." A strong start, but the apology kinda went downhill from there. "It was not sent to a whole bunch of people, and it went through my personal e-mail. People e-mail things all the time, but that's not an excuse."

No, it's not an excuse, particularly if you are an elected official. Seriously, if you're racially insensitive, could you please just stay away from cartoons for a bit?

GOP Chairman Michael Steele seems to be trying too hard to be hip. Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

Freshly minted Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele gave an interview with the Washington Times in which he detailed his plans for making the GOP relevant again. Says Steele:

We need messengers to really capture that region -- young, Hispanic, black, a cross section ... We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban hip-hop settings.

Hip-hop. Really? That's Chairman Steele's reductive take on people of color? That unless "principles" are framed in rhyme and break beats we will have no interest in them?

Steele's view seems oddly contrary to those people of color who are in fact ascending (or have ascended) in politics. Barack Obama's resonance with the populace was hardly based on any hip-hop cred. The same could be said for Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, and Harold Ford Jr., the former congressman who sought a Senate seat in Tennessee. They campaigned on issues, rather than disguising a dearth of ideas with faux "urban-suburban" hippness.

Yet Steele's entire interview with the Times is laced with an odd argot. His new PR campaign is going to be "off the hook." Steele "don't do 'cutting-edge.' " He does "beyond cutting-edge." His critics can "stuff it" ... ya dig? Rather than a politician with fresh ideas, he sounds more like somebody's uncle trying to be hip while playing some blacktop hoops with 16-year-olds.

Chairman Steele would do well to take a page from the playbook of George W. Bush. Bush, amazingly, was able to increase his share of the black vote from about 8 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004. Although slight, this uptick was driven by Bush's flogging of issues of faith. Unfortunately, the primary "issue of faith" was a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. While I don't advocate the demonization of one group to get votes from another, blacks do form a disproportionately large block of voters who regularly attend church. It would be more correct and probably more effective for Steele to recruit potential GOP-ers from the pews than by going "beyond cutting edge."

Whatever that may be.

What the advocates of dumping Black History Month miss is that watching Tiger sink a 20-foot putt or Oprah cooking with Rachael Ray doesn't exactly teach the kiddies about the Tuskegee Airmen or the Middle Passage or Plessy v. Ferguson.

So it's February. That means school kids across America are learning that George Washington Carver didn't actually invent the peanut, and a black man did invent the stoplight. And while the kids are learning, February by February, grown-ups are asking if maybe it's time to retire Black History Month.

This year, one op-ed writer flat-out said Black History Month "has come to seem quaint, jarring, anachronistic" and "robs blacks of [their] part in U.S. history."

The country is for sure in a different place than it was when historian Carter G. Woodson originated "Negro History Week" in 1926. Most obvious, of course, is that 83 years later we have a black man in the White House. Beyond that, black American history is now seemingly cranked out on a regular basis. Eric Holder becomes the first black attorney general. Mike Tomlin becomes the second black coach to win a Super Bowl championship in three years. The Republican National Committee is so desperate for relevance it elects Michael Steele as its chairman, and does so over Katon Dawson, who until last September belonged to a whites-only country club. Somewhere Strom Thurmond is doing about 8,000 rpms in his grave.

So, clearly, a nation whose icons are the likes of Tiger Woods, Oprah and Barack Obama doesn't need a Black History Month.

Yeaaaah, no.

What the advocates of dumping Black History Month miss is that watching Tiger sink a 20-foot putt or Oprah cooking with Rachael Ray doesn't exactly teach the kiddies about the Tuskegee Airmen or the Middle Passage or Plessy v. Ferguson. That's kind of like saying you can get a master class in Hispanic heritage by watching an episode of Ugly Betty.

Now, I happen to agree that Black History Month is a set-aside. But the reason it's set aside is because even in 2009, most schools do a poor job of integrating black history -- or Hispanic history or Asian-American history -- into their yearly curriculum. Are kids really taught about the Nisei brigade or Executive Order 9066, the Trail of Tears or the National Farm Workers Association?

This isn't the history of one ethnicity. It's our history. And until our history is fully explored throughout the school year, then Black History Month remains relevant.

President Obama talks with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the House Democrats Conference in Williamsburg, Va., on Feb. 5.Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

It's pretty safe to say that it's nearly impossible to make the transition from some other political slot to the presidency without hitting some speed bumps. Recollection of the gaffes, the flameouts, the regrettable nominations, could make for a Georgetown drinking game. Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood. Linda Chavez. The delayed stock divestitures of Paul O'Neill. Karl Rove meeting with Intel lobbyists. Don't ask, don't tell. Bad decisions don't own any party affiliation.

And yet ...

The Democrats have done an absolutely monumental job of screwing things up for President Obama.

Lately, some of the president's nominees have been falling like dominoes that have been finger-flicked by a playful IRS agent. Others have just teetered.

Having to step aside because of tax problems and ongoing influence-peddling scandals makes the Democrats look at best ignorant, at worst crooked. Their moral blind spots are so sizable they make the corporate CEOs who fly private jets to get their bailout money seem principled by comparison. If John McCain's woeful vetting of Sarah Palin wasn't still fresh in the public's memory, the SS Obama might well be sunk.

More troubling is the Democrats' pitiful mishandling of every single aspect of the stimulus bill. House Democrats have filled it with untimely spending. And they have allowed its legend to grow to ill and mythical proportions: lies about funding for ACORN, which is nowhere mentioned in the bill. Gross and unanswered misrepresentations by McCain about the "honey bee insurance" provision.

But the Republicans, on page and unwavering as always, have managed to take control of the public debate -- though the media's fascination with Rush Limbaugh's take on the bill is mind-boggling. At the same time, the Republicans have surreptitiously slipped in their own pork, such as the $6.5 billion they're allocating for Sen. Arlen Specter's much-beloved National Institutes of Health (and this creates jobs ... how?).

The Democrats have stood idle as Republicans initiated a false-flag campaign, pitting the unpopular Nancy Pelosi against the disliked Rahm Emanuel, while every step of the way artfully praising Obama and openly lamenting: if only more Democrats could be like him.

Never mind who's trying to throw whom under the bus. The fact that the president had to step to Pelosi and ask her to discard additional spending for family planning after she'd been allowed to babble on about its job-creating benefits on national TV speaks to a lack of coordination and a gross misreading of the public's mood.

Giving the new president the benefit of the doubt, clearly he thought the Democrats would make responsible use of their advantage in Congress.

If the liberal wing knew what responsibility was, perhaps. He will be better served by the Democratic moderates and Blue Dogs who take to heart his message of bipartisanship and understand the need for fiscal austerity.

But Obama unfortunately runs the risk of ending up like Jimmy Carter should he alienate the far left. When Carter tried to cut social programs in an attempt to lift America out of an economic crisis, he was abandoned by the far-left elements of the Kennedy Democrats and allowed to twist in the wind friendlessly.

Trouble with liberal Democrats? Why am I not surprised?

Republicans can be a funny bunch. They're against affirmative action, but they always seem to be able to find people of color to fill a slot just when they're most needed.

After Thurgood Marshall stepped down from the Supreme Court, President Bush (the first) was luckily able to find Clarence Thomas right there at the top of the waiting list to replace him. When Barack Obama looked like he would sail into his Senate seat in 2004, Republicans airlifted in Alan Keyes to run against him.

And now that the nation overwhelmingly voted Obama into the White House, the Republican National Committee has elected its first black American — Michael Steele — as its chairman.

The RNC held what was perhaps its least diverse national convention ever in 2008. The knee-jerk reaction to Steele's election might be to label the move as a desperate affirmative action-type response to Obama, the shifting demographics of America and, as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell says, the potential that Republicans will become nothing but a regional party.

Hardly.

Steele took the chair only after six hours and six different ballots, and he fairly squeaked by in a 91-77 vote. Squeaked by, it should be noted, a runner-up — Katon Dawson — who until recently belonged to a whites-only country club.

Where do you find a whites-only club in 2009? That isn't the GOP, that is. (For the record, it's the Forest Lake Country Club in Columbia, S.C.)

To be fair, Steele is probably one of the most centrist GOPers the GOP could find to run their show. The Economist sums up his resume this way: "Handsome, moderate, the grandson of a sharecropper and the only candidate who doesn't own a gun, he looks good on television even to non-Republicans."

He'll need to.

As a reminder, this historic event took place after potential RNC chair candidate Chip Saltsman brightened everybody's holidays by sending out CD stocking stuffers that included the not-at-all-offensive ditty "Barack the Magic Negro."

Good luck to Mr. Steele in rehabbing the GOP's image.